Got its Dose at Last

March 10, 1900

Summary

The “humiliating legislation against the colored man” has backfired and targets the white man’s “crowd" by creating positions in office that can only be achieved by the wealthy.

Transcription

The legislature of Virginia which was forward in passing humiliating legislation against the colored man was not slow in enacting damaging legislating against the white man as well.
This was just as we expected. In their blind haste to injure the colored man, they set a pace which carried them to a point where it seemed that they could not stop and their own kith and kin became the victims.
These thoughts are caused by the many howls which are now coming from the neighborhood of the cellar, where but a few days ago, the colored citizen was a hapless victim.
The Negro out of the way, these Negro-haters were looking around for a new victim.
Strange to say, in the darkness they grabbed some of their own crowd.
What else are we to presume when the Richmond, Va., Times, the champion and advocate of the “Jim Crow” Car, gives vent, March 6th, to the following utterances which seem to come from the deepest recesses of the heart of an individual in the direst misery:
“In spite of the fact that twenty-five out of a total of forty members of the Senate petitioned Governor Tyler to withhold his signatures from the bill creating commissioners to assess personal property, the Governor yesterday signed the bill, and it had become a law. The only hope now is that the Court of Appeals will declare the law to be unconstitutional, for the reason that it did not receive a constitutional majority of the Senate. There is little doubt that the court will so declare as soon as a test case which will be made up shall have been brought to its attention.
And again:
“We cannot but believe that this bill was introduced primarily for the sake of creating new offices in every county and city in the state. Under it more than a hundred new positions will be at the disposal of those control the dominant party. The fattest sort of pickings will belong to those who are fortunate enough to get any of these appointments, while an unscrupulous commissioner can make himself at once as wealthy and as odious as a Turkish tax-gatherer.”
….